Is the Spectre of War Rising Again?

Yes, and we find infinite fuel source, FTL travel becomes reality, all humans love eahc others, Palestines and Israels become single people and it turns out God was bored out alien kid who lost his bacteria farm.

We can all dream.

Btw, world peace is very real possibelity and achievable easily. It just happens to include removal of Homo Sapiens species from reality...

edited 13th Jun '11 7:46:23 AM by Mandemo

Yeah. We might run into some logistical problems disposing of dead carcasses. I mean, Stalin had the same trouble when he purged people. Who was going to clean up the mess, if he killed all the public sector workers?

I think we need to invent cheap, expendable, rugged 'bots before we get to that stage.

Or just use tools we have now: Nukes! We ensure that world peace continues since there is no-one to start again from animal kingdom :D </sarcasm>

Tru dat. But what if there is a handful of people who somehow have developed resistance to the effects of A) A bio-bomb, B) A H-bomb, or C)An ordinary A-bomb?

If the aim is to rid Earth of this parasite, then surely, we need to have a Plan B in case.

I would suggest burrowing down to the Earth's core and detonating a nuke down there. That would do away with homo sapiens.

Meh, Plan B is to detonate all nukes on single point on opposite site towards Sun, thus sending Earth spiralling towards Sun. No Earth = no world = no life = no wars = infinete peace. </logic>

I don't think China commissioning one second-hand carrier from Russia is a big deal. It's more of a big deal that such a powerful nation didn't have any, frankly.

In and of itself, China getting a carrier (particularly a half-assed one like the Russian hand-me-down) isn't that much of an issue.

However, it is a potential issue when combined with its other activities, like purchasing anti-shipping missiles and submarines that aren't all that useful as defensive weapons, and its claims of territory that just about no one in the rest of the world recognizes (particularly the Spratly Islands, which BTW technically includes Taiwan; the PRC has initiated force to take specific islands held by others in the past, and has yet to show anything regarding remorse about the it).

As I said over in the military thread elsewhere in OTC, I don't think the PRC is irrational enough to start a major war with the Pacific powers, but I'm not going to rule out smaller provocations by the PLA(N) to press their goals either.

edited 13th Jun '11 10:01:27 AM by Nohbody

Meh, more like China wants others to look and see "Fuck, these guys can actualy fight outside their borders". Subs and Aircraft carriers, are pretty much just big shiny toys, unless they carry nukes upon which they turn into "pre-emptive terror weapons"(or what my teacher called them), AKA "Hand from coffin".

I mean, seriosuly, these days aircraft carrier is best called giant "SHOOT ME" target. It's only purpose is to provide aircraft a launching and landing area where there is none.

Well territory disputes in East Asia isn't really something you want to get into because everyone has a 1000 year claim on everything.

so basicly it's Middle-East, except instead of basing claim on religious text, they base it on ethnics?

Makes more sense to me, stupid as that maybe be.

Yeah pretty much. I mean, Korea has changed hands like twenty times over the past 5000 years. Taiwan has been through several major countries (Portuguese, Tang Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, Japan, now Republic of China/Taiwan), completely ignoring the natives that used to live there (but they're mostly gone now due to various genocidal campaigns). There's those island chains in the South China Sea all of them are claimed by like 5-7 different countries each.

Everyone has a historical claim simply because some previous government of theirs owned it at one point. Plus the Japanese have such a bad reputation right now, all of their territory claims are basically met with vehement aggression by everyone else (like the islands to the north with Russia, to the west/south with Taiwan/Korea/China). You got 5000 years of history, you got 5000 years of conflicting claims.

World peace is merely a question of scale. We'll achieve world peace withour really realizing it, because by then, we'll be debating the possibility of inter-planetary peace.

As for Europe "never" getting their mojo back, thats a bit too absolute of a claim. Is the axis moving away from Europe? Yes and for the forseeable future. Does that mean they're doomed to third-world status? Nope. They've been at that status before (middle ages while all of Asia was rocking it) and they rose out of it quite nicely. Same will happen. then it will fall again then it will rise again.

The world is (gasp) cyclical folks!

^ Problem is those cycles tend to be very long. It took over a thousand years to truly recover from the fall of the (Western!) Roman Empire. 50 years ago a contemporary equivalent happened when the once-great superpowers of Europe like Britain and France relinquished their territories left and right and shrank their capabilities to nothing. (Seriously, had Argentina tried for the Falklands in 1903, the conflict would have been at best a footnote in history instead of the shining example of why you don't slash defensive capabilities. Really, The Falklands War should not have been that tough on Britain compared to what it was.)

It's going to be a very long time before the axis shifts in their favor again.

@FF: I see Europe returning to power after Asia is overwhelmed with environmental problems. But conisdering it's very divid, the US will stay the numbe rone country, even if the EU has more influence overall.

@Tom: Cycles cycle faster when technology improves faster. It's like Civilization: the more advanced you are, the faster the "turns " go.

You make certain assumptions that are not givens. The US is just like any other nation...it is capable of falling. It is capable of collapse. There is a reason the news goes on and on (and on and on) about the economy.

edited 13th Jun '11 6:48:24 PM by FFShinra

Such as?

Wasn't talking to you.

I see geography-based groupings (and powers) to be on the way out anyway. They don't really make all that much sense in a world with instantaneous communication and very quick transportation.

Assuming that these traits are maintained and improved in the future (this could fail in case of a massive energetic crisis or something else like that, though), I expect that future "superpowers" will be geographically distributed groups of people, and that physical distance from wealthy and powerful people will become an even poorer indicator of wealth and power than it is now.

edited 13th Jun '11 7:29:54 PM by Carciofus

Actually, historical trends appear to be moving us toward some sort of global political system anyway, because the elites of the world need stability in order to manage the globalized economy. It isn't necessary to imagine "world peace", just no large-scale disruptive wars. I really think we've seen the last of those. All the problems currently disrupting world economic development are solvable, even the environmental ones, given enough time to work on it. In 100 years, I think we will see a coalition of the world's most powerful states collaborating to keep a lid on violence and disruption everywhere (not so much the UN, but the G-20). By then, they will have a much more efficient method of intervening in places that are still experiencing low-intensity conflict. It wont ever go away, but it is already becoming manageable.

Some resources (the non-renewables) are indeed shrinking, but it will be awhile before that begins to affect economic growth, and in the meantime world pop growth is slowing down, and our technology becomes ever more efficient.

So I say with some confidence, and not starry-eyed idealism, the specter of war is not rising again.

So did people in 1921 and look where that ended up.

What if we just gave every nation over 9000 nukes so that nobody could declare war on each other without getting blown into oblivion?

Actually that was just propaganda. All the guys in the know and foreign policy wonks in general knew the "peace" of WWI wouldn't last. As opposed to now where people think wars of that scale are a thing of the past while the regular folks think the opposite.

edited 13th Jun '11 9:49:42 PM by FFShinra

^ And politicians were delirious both today and back then. People legitimately came to the conclusion that after something as horrifying as World War One there would be no more war. 100 years later people have learned their lesson and it's the hopelessly idealist who cling to the notion that war can be somehow abolished from the human condition.

People never truly change. The only difference between now and back then is people know better than to trust some grandiose notion that war is somehow done for.

edited 14th Jun '11 5:17:27 AM by MajorTom

Or in past, war was something between soldiers of two countries.

Now, everyone loses, no matter what. Previously we had all to gain and little to lose, now we have everything to lose and very little to gain.

^ That actually hits the point head on. With less and less to gain from war as history has progressed, it's become less common to fight large scale wars.

There might be war in the next few hundred years but right now, there's no incentive for anyone to do anything. Any war fought now will have to be based on totally insane troll logic to work. Everybody loses.

If China/USA fight, the entire global economy collapses. Africa can't sell to anyone any more. South America has no more investment.

The least disruptive war would be Russia and China fighting each other. The most would be USA and China. Somewhere in between would be China and India.

In any case, East Asia is a poor example of possible war. Every single country there has been dropping military spending as a proportion of their GDP over the past few decades. There could be brush fire wars, but without any money spent on the military, large scale war isn't manageable. Nobody can even get their troops into another person's country.